There are not many crane company founders left. But Vincente Guerra, managing director of Spanish crane builder and hoist manufacturer GH, still works for the company he founded with three brothers in 1952. In the early years, motivated by a lack of cash, the company made anything that there was market demand for – washing machines, radios, agricultural machinery and forklifts, among others. “We could have tried planes, but we never did,” he said recently.
“If you have nothing, you have to think. If you have everything, you don’t think,” he said.
That drive and intelligence has carried the company from selling to the Basque region to now an international business selling 2,000 cranes per year.
Underlying this is a respect for the customer and the culture, whoever and wherever they may be. “Europeans people and manufacturers think that we are above other parts of the world. Europeans might think that Chinese don’t know how to do things, but they have the biggest crane market in the world. Europeans should be more respectful of other countries,” he said.
